


Non-stop

by Newagenewbarricade



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening
Genre: Gen, Writing, autobiographical warden, idk how to tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-02
Updated: 2015-12-02
Packaged: 2018-05-04 15:31:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5339264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Newagenewbarricade/pseuds/Newagenewbarricade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Linara Mahairel knows what happens to elves in history, they get erased. She will never let that happen to her</p>
            </blockquote>





	Non-stop

                Linara stared at the pile of blank parchment in front of her. She felt her hands quake as she began scrawling word after word onto the pages, she needed to write it down or history would get it wrong get _her_ wrong. She’d learned how to write for this purpose alone,

                _Why do you write like it’s going out of style?_

                “ _Tamlen was a young warrior and a highly skilled hunter. He had tan skin and sandy hair, vallaslin of ghilan’ain on his face. He wasn’t a fool and we couldn’t have known what would happen when we found those ruins. Mythal’enaste I swear if we’d known we would never have gone, I would never have gone there and someone else would be writing these pages but no matter, what’s done is done and I can’t change my fate. It was sealed before I ever set foot in Ostagar_.”

                _How do you write like you need it to survive?_

                Her fingers were numb and blackened from the ink, pages barely drying before she flipped it over frantically to continue her narrative. History is written by the victors and she wasn’t about to let anyone else tell her story,

                “ _When I arrived at Ostagar I was dying on my feet and spoke only elvish. When I underwent the Joining I hoped I would die, but obviously the gods had a different plan for me. The tower of Ishal wasn’t supposed to be full of darkspawn, it was supposed to be an easy assignment for the two new wardens but instead I had my ribs shattered by an ogre.”_

                Blood flowed in her veins and ink flowed from her fingers. Wrapped up in her own story, bringing everything to the surface, the scratching of quill against parchment flooded the Warden Commander’s ears. She bashed her fist into the table as she looked over her writing, half elvish half human all unintelligible to anyone but her.

                _Every day you fight like you’re running out of time are you running out of time?_

She threw dagger after dagger at her door as she realized it didn’t matter what she wrote, no one could understand her scrawlings and even if they could who wants to hear the raving of a mad Dalish wretch? She screamed, gripping her face with ink stained finger tips. Her office door is full of daggers and when it opened, her soldiers almost were as well.

                “ _The ability to sense darkspawn is more than a simple awareness like one has with hunting. It’s a whole body experience, a numbing tingling, your blood runs cold and feels like a flask of acid within your skin. You hear a faint song in the back of your head and as they draw nearer it grows louder and spreads, you feel the song in the entirety of your being. When the spawn lay dead at your feet the song lingers, right now it’s only for seconds but you know eventually that song will linger longer and longer, and you will go to the deep roads where the song is even louder. That is where we wardens rest, the pits of the planet, forgotten and desecrated. I will never get a Dalish burial not that anyone seems to care about wardens when there’s no blight. How quickly we are forgotten.”_

                _How do you write like tomorrow won’t arrive?_

She knew no one would ever understand why she had to do this, why she wrote everything, every failure every exchange of words she had to write herself. Never a scribe, this was her story and no one else could be a part of its recording. Nothing could be omitted or prettied up or it would all be disregarded, she poured her very soul into the pages and soon the pages were so much of her that it was as if they had pulses of their own.

                “I _stood over Tamlen’s ghoulish body and shot him in the neck with an arrow. I collapsed beside him wishing nothing more than that I could’ve been in his place. He should’ve lived. Tamlen of clan Sabrae died of the darkspawn taint as will I, and the king of Ferelden and every warden who has ever and will ever live. Not that anyone ever talks about it, it’s taboo. But I never cared much for ideas that were forced upon me.”_

_Are you running out of time?_

                Five hundred and forty pages, every second of the blight. Her story. It had taken her years, her fingers were scratched and forever inkstained. The edges of the pages had blood sweat tears and probably the taint. She bound the volume herself and kept it in her desk at Vigil’s keep. She had several copies made, she knew for a fact that Velanna had one with her. She wove herself so thickly into the narrative, they couldn’t erase her now. All of history would know that Linara Mahariel hunter of Clan Sabrae had lived and saved the world in under a year. She couldn’t be bastardized or wiped from the narrative.

                _History has its eyes on you_

“I am Linara Mahairel.”

**Author's Note:**

> yes its inspired by the hamilton song Non stop, i love it okay? any and all feedback welcome and all that jazz


End file.
